Stress and sleep deprivation, two health issues that most Americans deal with regularly, can take a heavy toll. Just ask Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, 63, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Media Group and author of fourteen books, was putting in 18-hour workdays, seven days a week, as she built up her media company. Until one day, she passed out and awoke in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone. After undergoing tests, she was told the collapse had been brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. That’s when she began to re-evaluate how she measured success.

Arianna Huffington: I start every morning with 20 to 30 minutes of meditation. And the easiest way for me to course-correct and de-stress during the day is by focusing on my breathing.

Conscious breathing is something I can return to hundreds of times during the day in an instant. It helps me introduce pauses into my daily life, brings me back into the moment, and helps me transcend upsets and setbacks.

It has also helped me become much more aware when I hold or constrict my breath, not just when dealing with a problem, but sometimes even when I’m doing something as mundane as putting a key in the door, texting, reading an email, or going over my schedule. When I use my breath to relax the contracted core of my body, I can follow this thread back to my center.

EH: What advice can you give someone who’s new to meditation?

AH: Introducing just five minutes of meditation into your day can make a profound difference. Eventually, you can build up to fifteen or twenty minutes a day (or more), but even just a few minutes will open the door to creating a new habit— and all the many proven benefits it brings.

AH: When it comes to living well and committing to these practices, my advice is: Whatever your entry point is — take it. Right now you may just want to be better at your job, or help your company become more successful, and that’s the reason you start meditating, or practicing mindfulness, or sleeping more. But along the way you will likely also gain some added perspective on what matters in your life.

Going public about your decision — to meditate, to get more sleep, whatever it may be — can be one way to make that commitment stick. You'll be surrounded, as I found out, by sympathetic friends who have been wanting to do the same thing and will help you to stick to your goals. In my case, because I blogged about my commitment to get more sleep on the Huffington Post, I started having complete strangers come up to me at events, glancing at their watches and wondering how much longer I plan to stay and whether I was going to be able to get my eight hours. I felt like a kid out on a school night — with dozens of babysitters all anxious to help me keep my commitment.

EH: Which practice in your book was the hardest to stick to?

AH: Unplugging from all my devices! That’s why, last December, I decided to do something radical and take a weeklong unplugging challenge with [Glamour magazine editor-in-chief] Cindi Leive and [MSNBC co-host] Mika Brzezinski, which meant no social media, and limiting myself to two email check-ins a day with our HuffPost editors. Instead of being constantly connected, I spent Christmas in Hawaii with my daughters, my sister, and my ex-husband, not photographing beautiful sunsets, not tweeting pictures of my dinner, and skipping Throwback Thursday on Instagram in favor of, you know, just talking about things that happened in the past, and being immersed in things happening right now.

EH: If you had to make one practice top priority for improved well-being, which would it be and why?

AH: Get more sleep. The science on the importance of sleep is incontrovertible. Indeed, I have 55 pages of scientific endnotes at the end of “Thrive,” many of them about the health implications of sleep. So unless you are one of the wise few who already gets all the rest you need, you have an opportunity to immediately improve your health, creativity, productivity, and sense of well-being.